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Saturday, April 30, 2011

John Paul II argues that the limits of evil are defined by the divine Mercy. What does this mean? The implication is not that everyone is automatically saved by the divine mercy that will excuse every sin. It won't. It will forgive every sin that can be forgiven, but that is the point. Forgiveness is contingent on repentance. What was new in the world as a result of the Incarnation was precisely that sins were forgiven in principle by the sacrifice of Christ. Since he was both God and man, he alone bridged the gap of the heinousness of sin.

In the classic idea of punishment that we find in Plato and Aristotle, we see that the purpose of punishment, particularly voluntary punishment, was to restore the order that we have broken in our sins. Plato even states that we should want to be punished, that we are incomplete without it. Voluntary punishment is a sign that we recognize our part in putting disorder in the world.

Plato also held that if we commit a crime against someone, that act can only be forgiven by the one against whom the crime or sin was committed. What Christianity adds to this principle is that every sin is also an offense against God. This is why we cannot restore the order by ourselves.

Christianity combines both of these points. The sacrifice of Christ atones for the offense against God, and the public acknowledgement restores the validity of the law we voluntarily broke. Moreover, our sins can be forgiven by God, we can suffer the punishment, but the one against whom we sinned may still not forgive us. This refusal, however, is not our problem. The willingness to forgive is also included in revelation as one of our own responsibilities.

The limits of the divine mercy then are what God can forgive. He cannot forgive what is not asked or acknowledged. If he "imposed" forgiveness on us, we would cease to be free. This would negate the whole drama of our freedom and its consequences. God can respond to evil with good, as can we. Divine mercy broadens the scope of God's relation to us. But that broadening included the redemption on the Cross. God responded to the initial human disorder by driving Adam and Eve out of Paradise. They lost the way to God that was offered to them. But they were promised and finally give a second way, one that still respected their freedom and let the consequences of their acts remain in effect.

The limits of the divine mercy, then, are established by what even God cannot do. He cannot make us free and then make us un-free. What he can do is make us free and, when we abuse our freedom, offer us a way to restore the law or love we have violated. But even here, it is up to us. God can give us an example of what our sins cost. But he cannot make us see it or admit our part in it.

Would it have been better then for God not to have created us? By no means. God indeed risked something in creating free beings. He risked that some would reject his love. But he paid this price. We are redeemed in a fallen world in which justice remains alongside mercy. God preferred something rather than nothing. This is the reason we exist with the offering to us of eternal life, if we respond to his invitation. Such is the drama of the world we live in. We are the risk of God. Those who refuse the gift of grace, however many there be, are left with their choice. God cannot take that away from them. This is the limit of the divine mercy.

Jesus Christ told his disciples to "give to the poor." But from O'Donnell's commentary, one would have thought that Christ said, "give to government to give to the poor." Christ's injunctions to individual charity and the exacting of taxes by government are treated as one and the same in O'Donnell's analysis.

O'Donnell casts Jesus Christ as the premier tax theoretician for the welfare state, interpreting Christ's message of "give up everything" as a call for Marxist levels of taxation.

"The New Testament does have an answer to Rush's question, 'What would Jesus take?' and it's not one Rush is going to like," said O'Donnell. "And since he obviously has no working command of the Bible, it will surely shock him because he will be hearing it now for the first time. The answer is everything, not 35 percent, not 39.6 percent. One hundred percent."

O'Donnell describes Jesus Christ here as a very eager socialist, but if that is true, Christ's pejorative references to "tax collectors" should be expunged from the Gospel and lines like "treat them [the unrepentant] as you would a tax collector" should be changed to "treat them as you would a tax cheat." O'Donnell didn't mention those needed rewrites.

The theology underlying O'Donnell's commentary is curious to say the least. He interprets Christ's calls for sacrifice wholly in terms of the good of Caesar, not God. In O'Donnell's telling, Christ wanted his disciples to "give up everything" not for the kingdom of heaven but for the expansion of government agencies. Support for government programs is the test of sanctity for O'Donnell, which explains why he thinks its critics like Limbaugh are going to hell.

From the Vatican Information Service, details about the beatification of Pope John Paul II on Sunday, May 1, 2011, Divine Mercy Sunday:

VATICAN CITY, 29 APR 2011 (VIS) - This morning in the Holy See Press Office there was a meeting with journalists to explain and clarify the events planned for the beatification of the Venerable Servant of God John Paul II.

The speakers were Fr. Federico Lombardi S.J., director of the Holy See Press Office; Msgr. Marco Frisina, director of the Office of Liturgical Celebrations of the Vicariate of Rome; Fr. Walter Insero, director of the Office of Social Communications of the Vicariate of Rome; and Angleo Scelzo, undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

Fr. Lombardi explained that this morning, in the Vatican Grottoes, "the tomb of John Paul II was opened and the case containing the body of the Venerable Servant of God was extracted".

"As can be recalled, the Pope was buried in three coffins, the first of wood, which was displayed during the funeral, the second of lead, which is sealed, and the third, external one, which is also made of wood and was the one revealed this morning at the moment of the extraction from the tomb. It is in a good state of preservation, even though showing signs of the passage of time.

After the procedures to open the tomb, which began first thing in the morning, the coffin was displayed on a dais at the gravesite until 9:00am, when Cardinal Angelo Comastri, after a brief prayer, intoned the litanies.

“The Pope (John Paul II) was praying and he asked God: ‘Will Poland regain her freedom and independence some day?’ ‘Yes,’ said God, ‘but not in your lifetime.’ Then the Pope asked: ‘Lord, after I am gone will there be another Polish pope?’ ‘Not in my lifetime,’ said God.”—Cited in André Frossard, Portrait of John Paul II (Ignatius, 1988), 46

“My priestly vocation took definitive shape at the time of the Second World War, during the Nazi occupation. Was this a mere coincidence or was there a more profound connection between what was developing within me and external historical events?”—John Paul II, Gift and Mystery (Ignatius, 1996), 34

I.

As it watched him die, the world did not know what to do with John Paul II, or really what to do without him. Almost everyone who could make it to Rome for his funeral, from the mighty to the small, was there. Though we all die in private, he also died in public for the whole world to see. And they did see. Pope Wojtyla was the only man in public life in modern times who showed us how to live and how to die, both. He considered his illness as much a part of his papal office as preaching, appointing bishops, or the Sunday Angelus address. A pope is almost the only world figure whose office qualifications include dying as part of the job. When elected, he knows that his only escape is through death.

When I read George Weigel’s two-volume account of Karol Wojtyla’s life, I realized that this very prayerful man was also one of the most active men who ever lived. He was constantly thinking and often thinking ahead. He was both a man of thought and a man of action, a man of prayer and a man of amusement. The story I recounted above he enjoyed telling to others. Besides his many world trips, he visited more Roman and Italian parishes in his busy life than any Italian pope.

People just wanted to see him. Television executives loved him and hated him—loved him because he was always so remarkably personable and mysterious, hated him because he went right over their heads to say what he, not they, wanted. If he was there, he could not be overlooked. He was the most interesting figure in sight. He had a remarkable capacity—when talking to any one, from children, to young people, to the important, to the old—of shutting the rest of the world out and speaking directly to that person’s soul.

I have the impression that every man who ever met John Paul II, especially if he was a man of social, intellectual, or political stature, knew that he was meeting a greater man than he. Many would not admit this fact because of the implications in their own lives and for their own prestige. Everyone knew that here was a man. Women knew it. Youth knew it. The poor knew it. Only the proud did not know it, but they could not afford to know it and remain what they were. His very presence demanded integrity and honor.

The information that accompanies the RSV-2CE text of Genesis is on par with what we have seen with previous editions of the ICSB. Commentary typically takes up about 1/3 of a page, with particular sections of Genesis like Genesis 1-3 and the story of Abraham, taking up anywhere from 1/2 to 3/4 of the page. As a matter of fact, the commentary on Genesis 1:1-3 takes up over 90% of the page alone. Included with the commentary is a 4 page introduction with book outline, 5 word studies, 4 maps, 2 charts, and 3 topical essays covering "The Abrahamic Covenant", "The Sacrifice of Isaac", and "Blessing and Birthrights". The study questions, which were available in the individual NT volumes, are also contained in the appendix. Like the past editions, the study material is well organized, aided by the use of icon annotations, which alert readers to information on "content and unity of the Scripture", "living tradition", and "analogy of the faith", all well known to readers of Dei Verbum or the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Overall, another fine volume from Ignatius Press. I will likely utilize this volume, as well as recommend it, to the intro class I am teaching on the OT next Fall. Again, the ICSB series is intended for the average Catholic, so it isn't "scholarly" like the Anchor Bible or JPS Torah Commentary. Yet, there is a lot of great material in these volumes which can be a benefit for most Catholics. As I have mentioned in previous reviews of the ICSB, the true usefulness of this project will only be fully realized when the one-volume study Bible is completed. In many ways, the ICSB takes serious the Catholic view of Scripture reading, as described in Dei Verbum. A completed ICSB will be a wonderful resource whenever it is finally completed. Although, with the slow pace of releases, one wonders whether we will see even the volume on Exodus in 2011?

I'm not involved with the Catholic Study Bible commentaries, so I'm not sure what the answer is to that question (but let's not forget that the Bible was written and compiled over the course of thousands of years). When information comes available, I'll post it here, of course. More about the Book of Genesis commentary, authored by Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch, at www.ignatius.com.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

David Wilkerson, the Protestant evangelist best known for his best-selling book, The Cross and the Switchblade (1963; 50 millions copies in print!), was killed in a car accident yesterday in Texas; he was 79. His wife, Gwen, and the driver of the tractor trailer that Wilkerson ran into have been hospitalized.

I read The Cross and the Switchblade as a kid (and watched the 1970 movie, starring Pat Boone), and it certainly made me think more deeply about what it means to be a truly committed Christian. Wilkerson also wrote and spoke quite a bit about his gloom-and-doom end-times beliefs (many based on his claimed 1973 vision about the downfall of the U.S.), and he, like Tim LaHaye and Co., believed that the Catholic Church was a key player in the coming one world church that will deceive many, etc. In this regard, he was apparently an old-school dispensationalist. Obviously, I disagree with many things that Wilkerson believed. But in looking at his blog, I was struck by this post—his very last—made yesterday just hours before he died:

To believe when all means fail is exceedingly pleasing to God and is most acceptable. Jesus said to Thomas, “You have believed because you have seen, but blessed are those that do believe and have not seen” (John 20:29).

Blessed are those who believe when there is no evidence of an answer to prayer—who trust beyond hope when all means have failed.

Someone has come to the place of hopelessness—the end of hope—the end of all means. A loved one is facing death and doctors give no hope. Death seems inevitable. Hope is gone. The miracle prayed for is not happening.

That is when Satan’s hordes come to attack your mind with fear, anger, overwhelming questions: “Where is your God now? You prayed until you had no tears left. You fasted. You stood on promises. You trusted.”

Blasphemous thoughts will be injected into your mind: “Prayer failed. Faith failed. Don’t quit on God—just do not trust him anymore. It doesn’t pay!”

Even questioning God’s existence will be injected into your mind. These have been the devices of Satan for centuries. Some of the godliest men and women who ever lived were under such demonic attacks.

To those going through the valley and shadow of death, hear this word: Weeping will last through some dark, awful nights—and in that darkness you will soon hear the Father whisper, “I am with you. I cannot tell you why right now, but one day it will all make sense. You will see it was all part of my plan. It was no accident. It was no failure on your part. Hold fast. Let me embrace you in your hour of pain.”

Beloved, God has never failed to act but in goodness and love. When all means fail—his love prevails. Hold fast to your faith. Stand fast in his Word. There is no other hope in this world.

Amen to that. More here. May God have mercy on the soul of David Wilkerson.

After ten years of correspondence, filmmaker Michael Whyte was given unprecedented access to the monastery of the Most Holy Trinity, in London's Notting Hill. The monastery, founded in 1878, is home to the nuns of the Discalced Order of Carmelites, who lead a cloistered life dedicated to prayer, work and contemplation, rarely leaving the monastery except to visit a doctor or dentist. Silence is maintained throughout the day with the exception of two periods of recreation.

A highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning documentary, No Greater Love follows in the wake of the great success of a similar film, Into Great Silence, as it gives a unique insight into this closed world of these nuns where the modern world's materialism is rejected; they have no television, radio or newspapers. The film interweaves a year in the life of the monastery with the daily rhythms of Divine Office and work. Centered on Holy Week, it follows a year in which a novice is professed and one of the older nuns dies. Though mainly a meditational film, there are several interviews with the nuns, which offer insights into their lives, faith, moments of doubt and their belief in the power of prayer in the heart of the community. A beautifully filmed and deeply inspiring production.

Special Features include:

Introduction by Fr. Anthony Doe

Interview with Sister Susan Marie

The Stations of the Cross

Sister Luke's party piece for the celebration of St. George's Day

Film Trailer

Spanish subtitles

This DVD contains the following language tracks: English with English and Spanish subtitles.

This is a Region 1 DVD (playable ONLY in Bermuda, Canada, the Cayman Islands, United States and U.S. territories).

Death has come for me again. The others are already lost. I heard their screams as I was cast into the night; I heard them cursing as they burned or drowned before the roar of the explosion stopped up my ears and I fell into a world of silence. I am burnt by fire and stifled by the black, icy waters that drag me down. There is merciless darkness everywhere, which even the flames tearing the ship cannot pierce. I spin and struggle, raising my head for air as my blood freezes, and I know the sea will take me in the end.

The ship is gone now, and all that remains are burning fragments scattered like votive candles in the night. And I remain—the fragment of a human life, drifting to its close. I am not afraid to die, even though I will die unabsolved, but I am afraid to be alone. I fear the loneliness of the last journey down to the depths of the sea, where I will take my place among the dead, and no one will know that I came to such a pass. There will be no Requiem for me and no resting place, only a troublesome memory in the minds of a few old friends who believe that I died long ago, at the hands of another aggressor.

There are faces all around me; the spectral images of those I have loved dance around my head, taking their leave of me, whilst those I have lost gaze at me in silent accusation. I will die with so many lives to account for, so much blood I never meant to spill, but it cries out for vengeance nonetheless.

Death is so slow in coming that I find myself fighting. If I had desired death as I yearned for it once, I would not have run onto the deck when I knew the end was truly coming; I would not cling now to splintering driftwood, praying that it will hold me. The very motion of lifting my head to take a breath is an act of defiance. I feel no pain, the chill takes away all sense, and I feel only the weariness of death as it reaches out to me. I have died so many times and been returned to the land of the living that I could almost believe I am not meant to go down with the ship—but I am cold. I am cold and weary and cannot draw breath any longer. In the gloom above my head a single star shines. Stella ... Stella Maris. I am lost. Stella Maris. I call out to the Star of the 'Sea but cannot hear my own voice ringing out across the murderous water. Perhaps this is death, then—cruel death from which I can never awaken. I cannot hold onto the driftwood any longer. My hands grow limp and numb with the cold, so that I cannot feel my own fingers as they uncurl.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Cardinal Francis George suspended Rev. Michael Pfleger from his ministry at St. Sabina Catholic Church and barred him from performing Catholic sacraments over public statements Pfleger made about a possible reassignment.

In a letter from George to Pfleger released to the media on Wednesday, the Cardinal said Pfleger’s public remarks that he would leave the Catholic Church rather than accept a position outside of St. Sabina led to his decision.

“If that is truly your attitude, you have already left the Catholic Church and are therefore not able to pastor a Catholic parish,” George wrote.

Pfleger didn’t speak publicly Wednesday, but St. Sabina church leaders said they are upset at the Cardinal’s decision and offended that Pfleger had to learn about his suspension through the media.

“He was ambushed,” said Associate Pastor Kimberly Lymore, flanked by more than a dozen church leaders outside the church. Lymore said Pfleger has “given his life to this community.” She said Pfleger is “upset,” and “in shock, just as we all were.”

Ambushed? Really? I'd say he should have been shocked that it took this long for the long-suffering Cardinal George to finally reach the end of his rope. And it seems fairly obvious that Fr. Pfleger wanted it to happen, judging by his recent comments, which Cardinal George directly mentions in his letter:

That process has now been short-circuited by your remarks on national radio and in local newspapers that you will leave the Catholic Church if you are told to accept an assignment other than as pastor of Saint Sabina Parish. If that is truly your attitude, you have already left the Catholic Church and are therefore not able to pastor a Catholic parish. A Catholic priest's inner life is governed by his promises, motivated by faith and love, to live chastely as a celibate man and to obey his bishop. Breaking either promise destroys his vocation and wounds the Church. Bishops are held responsible for their priests on the assumption that priests obey them. I have consistently supported your work for social justice and admired your passion for ministry. Many love and admire you because of your dedication to your people. Now, however, I am asking you to take a few weeks to pray over your priestly commitments in order to come to mutual agreement on how you understand personally the obligations that make you a member of the Chicago presbyterate and of the Catholic Church.

With this letter, your ministry as pastor of Saint Sabina Parish and your sacramental faculties as a priest of the Archdiocese are suspended. The official rescript will follow, but this suspension permits you to retain the office of pastor while temporarily without permission to function. ...

Father Pfleger, I deeply regret that your public remarks have brought you to a moment of crisis that I pray will quickly pass. This conflict is not between you and me; it's between you and the Church that ordained you a priest, between you and the faith that introduced you to Christ and gives you the right to preach and pastor in his name. If you now formally leave the Catholic Church and her priesthood, it's your choice and no one else's. You are not a victim of anyone or anything other than your own statements. To avoid misrepresentation and manipulation on anyone's part, this letter will be released to the parish, which is to publish it in its entirety, and to the media after it has been delivered to you.

... this bit of news from Robert R. Reilly, the outstanding music critic for InsideCatholic.com:

Earlier this month, I stopped in London for three evenings of concerts, accompanied by meetings with five composers. I had the good company of the brilliant young German music critic Jens Laurson, who joined me from his home in Munich.

Ignatius Press has agreed to bring out an expanded and revised edition of my book, Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music (initially published by Morley Press in 2002), and Laurson has generously consented to collaborate on it. We have already conspired on a list of composers whom we wish to add, including Walter Braunfels, Paul Juon, Robert Simpson, Joly Braga Santos, Ahmed Saygun, Othmar Schoeck, and Joseph Jongen. If you have not heard of these composers . . . well, that is the point of writing about them.

Offer ends Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 at 12:00 midnight EST. These prices are available online only through Ignatius.com

Pope John Paul II had a profound theological, spiritual and moral impact on countless Catholics and non-Catholics alike. He was an amazing charismatic spiritual leader who helped bring down Communism and renewed the life of the Church. In honor of this great man, whose Beatification will be performed by Pope Benedict on May 1 in Rome, Ignatius Press is offering 20% off many powerful books and films. Learn more about the man who was a defender of all that is true, good and beautiful, especially of marriage and family life, with any of these inspiring products listed below.

James Kirk Wall, author of Agnosticism: The Battle Against Shameless Ignorance, seems to think he has come up with a clever line of agnostic apologetics to pursue in getting rid of Hell:

Pastor Rob Bell is arguing that there may be no Hell. Would Christianity still be able to sell without Hell, or would membership plummet?

Heaven and Hell make up the greatest marketing campaign ever created by man. If you buy what we’re selling, you will live forever in happiness. If you don’t, fire and brimstone for all eternity!

Uh, yeah, that's a perfect to way to put it—if you're into flippant, theologically-challenged, and historically-illiterate snarkiness. Which I'm sure is appealing to many people. Personally, I've never had a problem with belief in Hell; my issue, as a Fundamentalist, was with purgatory. But once I read what the Catholic Church actually teaches about purgatory, as opposed to the all of the Jack Chick-type silliness I was fed growing up, it made sense. (In fact, the fact that so many Catholics dismiss purgatory as superfluous or silly shows just how rotten catechesis has been generally since the 1960s.)

My experience is that people (some of them avowed atheists) who are dismissive of Hell have both a faulty understanding of what it is and isn't, but also a warped understanding of who God is and is not (or what orthodox Christianity says about God). This is understandable to a certain degree, as some Christians do indeed portray God as something of angry old man who can't wait to shoot sinners out of his celestial cannon into the fires of damnation. But if there only heaven, or no afterlife at all, it does beg the question: can we really speak meaningfully about good and evil, as well as justice? The short answer is, "No" (as I touched on a bit in this post yesterday). Ross Douthat, in his April 24th column, "A Case for Hell", writes:

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death ... salvation or damnation.”

Hell make perfect sense if we have a sense of perfection desired, a hope for justice fulfilled, and a recognition of free will granted. To quote, once again, from Benedict XVI's Spe Salvi:

To protest against God in the name of justice is not helpful. A world without God is a world without hope (cf. Eph 2:12). Only God can create justice. And faith gives us the certainty that he does so. The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope. Is it not also a frightening image? I would say: it is an image that evokes responsibility, an image, therefore, of that fear of which Saint Hilary spoke when he said that all our fear has its place in love. (par. 44)

Returning to Wall's question, I think that much of the evidence is in: those churches and Christian groups that deny the existence of Hell—that is, the real possibility of being able to freely reject God to live with that choice for eternity—don't have much long-standing appeal. Mainline Protestant denominations that have abandoned belief in Hell (along with other basic doctrines) are dying or dead. Why? There is the matter of Jesus and the New Testament writers making plenty of references to Hell; there is also the nagging suspicion (confirmed, upon thought and investigation) that promising heaven without the need to freely choose love, life, and goodness is a cop-out, a con job, and a contradition. It fails to make sense of sin and it fails to provide real hope:

From the earliest times, the prospect of the Judgement has influenced Christians in their daily living as a criterion by which to order their present life, as a summons to their conscience, and at the same time as hope in God's justice. Faith in Christ has never looked merely backwards or merely upwards, but always also forwards to the hour of justice that the Lord repeatedly proclaimed. ...

In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer's own soul, while reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement, however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally different form. The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world's suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. (Spe Salvi, 41, 42)

Ruth Pakaluk died of metastatic breast cancer in 1998 at the youthful age of 41. She had seven children (one of whom died of sudden infant death syndrome), and was married to Michael Pakaluk, professor of philosophy at Ave Maria University (and columnist for The Boston Pilot). Ignatius Press has just published a magnificent volume of her letters and talks entitled "The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God," edited with a biographical overview and notes by Michael.

One might think that her life, marked by the untimely deaths of her son Thomas, followed by her own, was tragic. Actually, it is more a divine comedy that has a happy ending, manifesting "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," one of her favorite lines from a Graham Greene novel.

This is because, as Michael documents in his introduction, Ruth's life was one of continual conversion and joy amidst the ups and downs of daily life. She showed "the greatest love in the smallest things," as Pope Benedict recently said of St. Therese of the Child Jesus. Gifted with a great sense of humor, a powerful and penetrating intellect, and a dynamite writing style, Ruth reminds me of Flannery O'Connor, the great American writer whom Thomas Merton compared to Sophocles.

Okay, I'm biased. I knew Ruth the last ten years of her life, and have always been close to Michael and the Pakaluks. Ruth, Michael and I were all active in Opus Dei as well as the pro-life movement, and we all had Harvard bachelor's degrees. Funny to think of Ruth (or Michael, for that matter) as a bachelor of anything, since they got married as undergrads. Ruth went on to serve as president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life for a number of years, as if being a mother and homemaker didn't give her enough to do. ...

The pope could easily have been explaining Ruth when he said earlier this week: "Christian holiness is none other than charity, fully experienced." However, in order that charity might, "like a good seed, grow in the soul and there bear fruit, the faithful must listen gladly to the Word of God and, by its grace, carry out His will through their works, participate frequently in the sacraments, above all the Eucharist and the Holy Liturgy; they must constantly apply themselves in prayer, in the abnegation of their selves, in the active service of their brothers and in the exercise of every virtue" (Pope Benedict XVI, general audience of April 13, 2011).

Get this book. Read this book. It couldn't be more timely: A Hollywood movie out next month entitled "There Be Dragons" depicts the origins of Opus Dei in the early years of St. Josemaria Escriva, its founder. Ruth's story is likewise one of holiness, extraordinary virtue, lived amidst ordinary concerns in modern America. Her story, though practically here and now, is nonetheless timeless and radiant.

In 1948 Aurora Marin arrives with her family at the convent of the Canossian Sisters of Schio, Italy, where Sister Bakhita has just died. Aurora was hoping to see her before she died. She gathers her children around the picture of Bakhita and tells them of the incredible life of the woman that had raised her as her nanny.

Born in a village in Sudan, kidnapped by slavers, often beaten and abused, and later sold to Federico Marin, a Venetian merchant, Bakhita then came to Italy and became the nanny servant of Federico's daughter, Aurora, who had lost her mother at birth. She is treated as an outcast by the peasants and the other servants due to her black skin and African background, but Bakhita is kind and generous to others. Bakhita gradually comes closer to God with the help of the kind village priest, and embraces the Catholic faith.

She requests to join the order of Canossian sisters, but Marin doesn't want to give her up as his servant, treating her almost as his property. This leads to a moving court case that raised an uproar which impacts Bakhita's freedom and ultimate decision to become a nun. Pope John Paul II declared her a saint in the year 2000. Directed by Giacamo Campiotti (St. Giuseppe Moscati, Doctor Zhivago) and stars Fatou Kine Boye, Stefania Rocca, Fabio Sartor, Ettore Bassi, and Francesco Salvi. Includes a 16 page collector's booklet by Daria Sockey.

This DVD contains the following languages: Italian with English or Spanish subtitles.

This is a Region 1 DVD (playable ONLY in Bermuda, Canada, the Cayman Islands, United States and U.S. territories).

"The reason it is so difficult to argue with an atheist—as I know, having been one—is that he is not being honest with himself." — J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know. (Revised and Expanded Edition; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 66.

"If Sophists are to run the courts and the civil service, they need plenty of help. From somewhere there must come a stream of people, who think as they do, to fill vacancies as they open up. Universities fill this need. Ordinary people who have not spent time on college campuses find it difficult to believe just how thoroughly they subvert the mind and how little they train it." — J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know. 181.

I.

Among those scholars who write so well on natural law—Rommen, Lewis, Finnis, George, Matlary, Hittinger, Veatch, Kries, Simon, Grisez, Maritain, Kreeft, McInerny, Fortin, Syse, Dennehy, Koterski, Bradley, Glendon, Smith, Rice, Sokolowski—J. Budziszewski, at the University of Texas, holds a special place. In addition to a first-rate mind, he is probably the best rhetorician of them all. He leaves no argument before he has taken it step by step to its logical conclusion.

Budziszewski does not allow those who refuse to see the truth of an issue to have the satisfaction of thinking that the problem is with the truth and not with their own minds and souls. The only protection against the Budziszewski logic is to refuse to listen, to refuse to engage in argument, mindful of those fierce men in the Acts of the Apostles who, at the stoning of Stephen, held their hands over their ears lest they hear the truth they refused to listen to (Acts 7). In argument, Budziszewski combines the tenacity of a Georgia Bulldog with the weight of a Texas Longhorn. It is thus not surprising that he is a professor of philosophy and politics at the University of Texas.

Budziszewski's first book on natural law—Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (InterVarsity Press, 1997)—was published while he was a Protestant. It is a remarkable book that I have used in class. It is an especially useful book that approaches natural law with the full armor of Scripture behind it. Obviously, as mentioned in the introductory citation above, before Budziszewski was a Protestant, he was an atheist. So he has been around the bend with considerable experience, which happily shows in this book, What We Can't Not Know. He became a Catholic a number of years ago, much to the relief of his admirers. The notion that someone with the noble name Budziszewski was a Protestant or an atheist, with all due respect to both, just did not sound right, especially since everything he said seemed so Catholic. But that is another story.

A book that should be given as a Christmas gift to your favorite lawyer or law student is Budziszewski's short, to the point, Natural Law for Lawyers. His recent study from ISI Books, The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction, begins with the profound sentence from Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being," a passage with an obvious debt to Plato. And, of course, it is the theme of this book. All things, both of order and disorder, begin and end in the wills and souls of men and—even more obviously in this book—women.

We are used to hearing that the natural law is old hat, that no one agrees with it any more, that we have a "new" morality. This is pretty much the case. But that is precisely the point where Budziszewski begins the argument. Is it really possible to deny the natural law? What happens when we do seek to justify our "reasons" for rejecting it? What happens is that someone like Budziszewski will come along to examine just what we use for arguments against the natural law.

In every case, it turns out that the denial of any element in classical natural law depends on the natural law for its validity. When we sort out the meaning of the argument that is purportedly against the natural law, we find that we are necessitated to claim some basis in truth that justifies our position that opposes the natural law. When we dance around this issue, we find ourselves implicitly affirming one natural law principle against another. Once we straighten out this confusion or deliberate blindness, we can see that classical natural law position was in fact the correct one and the more human one.

The present book has eleven chapters and four appendices, and is divided into four sections: 1) "The Lost World," 2) "Explaining the Lost World," 3) "How the Lost World Was Lost," and 4) "Recovering the Lost World." The "lost world" obviously refers to Budziszewski's provocative title, What We Can't Not Know. Clearly, there are things that we do not know, or do not know yet, or have forgotten. Likewise, there are divine things that we only know if they are revealed to us. But once they are revealed, much of our ingenuity is spent on avoiding the implications that what God intended for us to know is either important or required of us. We find that this revelation and thinking about it makes us more philosophical, not less.

Budziszewski does not confuse reason and revelation. His first three appendices are devoted to brief but accurate statements about how the Decalogue, and the Noahide Commandments, as well as Isaiah, several of the Psalms, and Paul are related to the natural law. Basically, the natural law and revelation on these basic points say the same thing. This agreement suggests to us that they are both from the same source. Indeed, this fact of the same content suggests that revelation was directed to the human mind itself as it thinks what it means do "do good and avoid evil."

Monday, April 25, 2011

The purpose of this beatification process, as with any such process, was to determine whether the life under study was one of heroic virtue. Over 100 formal witnesses were consulted and the four-volume study includes their testimonies, as well as a biography of the late pope and an examination of what were termed “special questions” — issues that arose during the beatification process itself, such as the charge (likely planted by former Stasi operatives) that young Karol Wojtyla had been involved in the assassination of two Gestapo agents during World War II. The charge was ridiculous, and it was refuted.

Evidently, the overwhelming judgment of those responsible, including Pope Benedict XVI, was that this was indeed a life of heroic virtue. I think that judgment is correct. It doesn’t mean that, as pope, John Paul II got everything right. No pope does. The question is whether he made his decisions prudently, according to his best judgment, and without fear or favor. In The End and the Beginning, the second volume of my biography of John Paul II, I explored that question over some 90 pages. My judgment is that John Paul consistently used his best judgment, without fear or favor, even in decisions I think he got wrong.

3. What were the chief qualities of John Paul II? What were his principal faults?

John Paul II’s radical Christian discipleship, and his remarkable capacity to let that commitment shine through his words and actions, made Christianity interesting and compelling in a world that thought it had outgrown its “need” for religious faith. He was a man of extraordinary courage, the kind of courage that comes from a faith forged in reflection on Calvary and the murder of the Son of God. He demonstrated, against the cultural conventions of his time, that young people want to be challenged to live lives of heroism. He lifted up the dignity of the human person at a moment when the West was tempted to traipse blithely down the path to Huxley’s brave new world of manufactured and stunted humanity. And he proclaimed the universality of human rights in a way that helped bring down the greatest tyranny in human history.

He was, like many saintly people, too patient with the faults of others. His distaste for making a spectacle of anyone, and his willingness to give people a second, third, and fourth chance, were admirable human qualities that arguably worked against the efficiency of his governance.

In experiments involving 100 students at UBC, the researchers found that a belief in God doesn’t deter a person from cheating on a test, unless that God is seen as mean and punishing.

Students who believed in a caring, forgiving God were more likely to cheat — as likely, in fact, as students who professed no belief in God.

“When you look at the division between nonbelievers and believers, there was no difference in cheating,” Shariff said. “It doesn’t matter so much whether you believe in God, but what God you believe in.”

Shariff said he wasn’t necessarily surprised that students who believe in a punitive God would be less likely to cheat. That’s consistent with a “supernatural punishment hypothesis” that has long recognized that societies can “outsource” the time-consuming task of promoting moral behavior to a supernatural agent, he said.

“Rulers have known for a long time that God is an incredibly effective way of keeping people in line,” he said.

Shariff said he was more surprised that students who believe in a forgiving God were more likely to cheat.

“It almost gives people license to act in an immoral way because they have a supernatural agent who will forgive them regardless of what they do,” he said. “They’ll think, ‘It’s OK to do this because I won’t be judged too harshly because my God is a forgiving God.’ ”

All joking aside, the rest of the article is rather revealing, perhaps as much about the research criteria itself as the results. The piece reports: "Students rated God on 14 traits, half loving, half punitive, and could express belief in a God who was at once highly loving and highly punitive. On the whole, students were more likely to believe in a loving God than a mean-spirited God, Shariff said."

Without having seen the study, it sounds as if students had to choose between polar opposites that are, from the standpoint of orthodox Christian theology, quite misleading and misrepresentative. Further, it sounds as if the notion of "loving" in the study equates, at least in the minds of many of the students, to "letting me get away with cheating", or at least "will forgive me for cheating without asking for anything in return". That, needless to say, isn't a loving God, but a Dr. Spock-inspired, coddling, spineless enabler. And, on the other end, the belief that punishment is somehow part and parcel of being "mean-spirited" is equally misguided. After all, how many of the students, I wonder, believe that criminals should get away with, say, murder, rape, or molestation without being punished in some way?

A basic problem is that "love" is too often divorced from a sentiment-free view of reality that is rooted in the belief of an objective, moral order. If no such moral order really exists, then "love" simply becomes a matter of sliding-scale sentiment, in which one's subjective affections become the arbitrary and voluntaristic basis for relationships, order, and community. Not surprisingly, when people adopt this basic perspective, they read it back into their notion of God. Of course, as Benedict XVI pointed out in his Regensburg address, it was a voluntaristic understanding of God that led, step by logical step, to a relativizing of morality and the creation of a false love severed from any transcendent source:

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn's Introduction to the April 13th Presentation of the YOUCAT (Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church) at the Vatican has been translated into English by Michael J. Miller (who also translated the Youth Catechism):

Introduction to the Presentation of YOUCATCardinal Christoph Schönborn

In 2006 the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church was presented in Vienna. At the news conference one woman stood up and said, “This book is not suitable for young people.” I think that she was right. Somehow or other I then expressed the idea: Let’s try therefore to make something for the youth. And with that my part in it was already almost finished. For the work on the book itself was done entirely in Germany. Of course we could not have guessed that something would really come of this project. In the following remarks you will hear how the project was planned and how it was carried out. First, though, I would like to give a brief historical retrospect.

In 1985 I served the Synod of Bishops as a “theological assistant”; at that time I was still a professor of dogmatic theology in Fribourg, Switzerland. The Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law gave a speech in Latin, and the key sentence read: “Iuvenes Bostonienses, Leningradienses et Sancti Jacobi in Chile induti sunt ‘blue jeans’ et audiunt et saltant eandem musicam.” In English: “Young people from Boston, Leningrad and Santiago de Chile wear blue jeans and listen and dance to the same music.” Starting from that observation, Cardinal Law meant to say: It must be possible after all in a globalized world to give expression to the faith, too, in a common language. Against all objections, the project was successful. Pope Benedict XVI, in his magnificent Foreword to YouCat reminds us of the objections that he himself had too. And so the Catechism of the Catholic Church came to be, which no doubt, despite all the objections and all the misgivings, became a success worldwide. Nevertheless it was clear from the start that we must make room also for local catechisms, for catechisms aimed at a specific readership, and YouCat is one such attempt at a catechism for youth.

Why have a catechism in the first place? Vatican II commissioned no catechism, unlike the Council of Trent. Twenty years after the end of the Council the World Synod of Bishops determined that the work of handing on the faith had come to a standstill! Therefore there had to be something like a clearinghouse [Vermittlung] of the major doctrinal teachings of the Council and of the whole Church in a didactic form, which would be oriented once more to the old catechism. The great model for this catechism was the catechism of Trent from the year 1566, in its structure as well as in its irenic style and tone. Peter Canisius, the only Saint to have occupied the episcopal see of Vienna, although only as administrator of the Archdiocese, composed his great catechism in Vienna, and also his “Minimus”, his Little Catechism. Is the literary genre “catechism” still justified today even after Vatican II? The Catechism of the Catholic Church encouraged us to think so. YouCat is once again a catechism in the question-and-answer format. The Compendium was already an attempt at this format—in my opinion, a not entirely successful attempt. I believe that this is a successful attempt. We will see.